The Call **

“The Call” is a movie that was not high on my list of movies to see. The trailers made it seem like a budget style thriller in the vein of “Cellular”. The result is no where near as bad as I thought but still too incompetent to recommend.

The story revolves around 911 operators and the work that they do. Halle Berry plays an operator who gets shaken up after a particular call ends in tragedy. We catch up with her months later to find that she is no longer and operator but a teacher who shows new recruits how to perform the job.

I was pretty amazed about how much information “The Call” had about 911 operators. The best scenes in the movie were when we simply got to watch them in action. Some of the creative ways they help people really blew my mind a bit.

But back to the plot. When Berry takes over a call from a young girl who has been kidnapped, she finds herself in a race against time to save the young ladies life.

SPOILER ALERT – Now comes one of the major problems with this movie. The kidnapper turns out to be a serial killer but how he has not been caught by now is the movie’s biggest mystery. He is portrayed as extremely incompetent in almost every scene he is in. If you just kidnapped someone, would you not tie them up before putting them in your trunk? Even if you didn’t, wouldn’t you do it after repeatedly foiling their attempts to escape? What about if you kidnapped a second person and put them in the trunk? Would you not tie them up either?! I could go on about this guy quite a bit.

My other problem is with the end of the movie. Yes I know the plot requires Berry to actually rescue the girl herself, no matter how unlikely that is, but the final scene was truly disturbing and totally unbelievable. You will know it when you see it.

I found myself wishing that “The Call” had dropped it’s generic plot and focused on just the day to day life of a 911 operator because they are some unsung heroes and the scenes where they perform their craft were spellbinding.